Being vulnerable

Hello I'm Jaclyn and I am a vulnerable person.

That may seem like a very simple and frivolous statement but there is a deeper meaning behind this for me.

This past week I have been spending time realizing how I am a scared person and have so many fears, and how all these fears are handcuffing my life.  Being someone that analyzes everything to death, I started by listing out all my fears and then organizing them into categories.

For instance, I created a group of fears related to my family which included my fear of causing them shame and embarrassment, fear of disappointing them and ultimately the huge fear of hurting them irrevocably by being selfish with any possible action I could take.

I have another group of fears that I grouped with society which include never being accepted, fear of being open/making friends with someone as I have nothing to offer, as being treated as a disgusting freak or being manipulated/lied to in order to fit social norms or someone else's agenda. 

From my past medical traumas, I have also fostered another set of fears towards people that may be wanting to help me as well.  This includes a fear towards trusting any one in the medical/therapeutic field and a fear of being told that I am hopelessly flawed and unfixable and worthless.  Yes I truly cannot trust anyone.

You probably see the point that I could keep going on listing fears including the fear that my ideas/perceptions are all wrong, fear that to trust others means that I need to give up some tiny bit of being in control and any change will be far worse than not doing anything and languishing in my fears.

As I list all of these down on a piece of paper, there is really one big hairy fear that they all tie into which is probably my ultimate fear.  This is the fear of me, the fear of trusting myself, the fear that allowing myself anything or acceptance will only lead to loss of everything and everyone and leave me completely empty and alone.

That is the fear this all leads to and the fear that drives me everyday to do or not do anything to change. I (aging myself here) harken back to The Wall by Pink Floyd as symbolic of my life.  Each day, all I do is put another brick on the layer that I use to hide away from the world and spend my time being depressed and alone in the entrapment I have built.  Whenever one of my fears comes up (queue the situation), this is my safety net that I run like hell back to isolate and cry.

I have been lying awake at night thinking why I get so traumatized by looking into a mirror or seeing myself in a photo.  My self body image is so intense that I spend several hours each day obsessing and hating myself with so much disgust that I can't capture in words.  I believe that these feelings may be manifestation of my personal fear.  It is my fear of peering over the edge of the bricks I have built around me that I thought were for protection but really have been a prison. 

I hate and I am disgusted of myself because I am afraid of myself.

That brings me back to my opening proclamation to be vulnerable.  Again it mean seem like something that comes from being self accepting or trusting others but just telling myself that I am vulnerable to others at this moment in my life is really a huge thing to me.  This means that I am giving up at least the tiniest bit of control or protection at open up to others.  It means that I have to suspend all my fears, all my self-judgements, all those voices in my head that tell me to hid and build my wall higher and higher.   To someone it may seem like a very tiny step but for me this seems like an impossible one nonetheless.

Which is why I am starting to take this step today, right now, right here in the anonymous and protected virtual world.  I still do not feel like I can transfer this vulnerability to the real world as my fears are still too strong against me.  I know that out in the world there are so many people sharing and trusting and being vulnerable and living, but I just don't feel capable of that at this moment.   All I can do is to write about this and talk to myself here and I just need to practice within my walls before I can remove the first brick.

Maybe one day I will be lying awake in the middle of the night not thinking about all my fears but feeling like I actually did something instead of run away from them.  For today, my bravery is just going to be trying to trust and open myself up in writing here and be vulnerable just in a tiny bit.  This all I can be today.

Trying to find unconditional happiness

In my quiet and isolated world of self-reflect, I have been thinking a lot about happiness lately at the challenge of trying to identify it. 

Not just the things that make me happy, but the feelings and instances where I recall some form of over-brimming happiness in my life. For a sad and depressed person like me, finding spots of happiness in my memory is a difficult task. I can think of a few recent occurrences but those are mostly what I call as conditional happiness. 

To me, conditional happiness is the type of happiness you tell yourself without fully feeling it.  To me, this involves my happiness being totally dependent on the moment/action/event causing someone near me to feel or at least appear to feel happy.  I have been trapped in this conditional happiness pattern for a long time as I have trouble valuing myself not at the bottom of everyone else and not feeling I have any right to deserve to be happy.  Call that low self-worth or depression or any other therapeutic term but I can only remember times when I smiled and pretended to be happy in my recent memory.

So, I guess what I am thinking about today is what I am going to label unconditional happiness. To me, these are the happy moments that seem to gush out of you. The moments when your head is swimming and dancing and feeling unencumbered by what anyone else says, thinks or sees. I can't give it an exact clinical definition, but I think this is a moment that you feel happiness for yourself without any guilt, shame or any other feeling of others. For someone that perhaps never grew up in an environment with unconditional love, it is not surprising that I struggle with unconditional happiness as well. To be honest with myself, the last moment that I can recall as having this unconditional moment was being Jaclyn.

That was an evening that I went out, shared and was vulnerable to a total stranger and allowed her to make me feel good about myself. We took several photos that night that I use as my profile pic - I consider those my glamour shots not only for my photo image but because of the feelings of that night that I get looking at them. I struggle with words to the feelings that I still get with those images even though these are so long now in the past and I have felt so much shame and guilt about them since. I'm sort of still chasing that high from that night and chasing those feelings but I cannot. I don't know if the reality of consequences or my fear or what the reason it is but I don't think I can get back to that point ever again. 

At the present, I am struggling with going out in the world again and feeling vulnerable and true.  I snook out in some jeggings last week for a very brief moment and that mere act was extremely difficult.

I felt ashamed and along and pathetic at this all and wonder why I spent so much energy around a very silly and brief moment.

My pattern seems to be devoid of finding unconditional happiness again.  I have crashed and burned and can't seem to reframe myself anymore. I have another opportunity to explore ketamine treatment as a suggestion to try to open up the blocked pathways in front of me.  I am so scared at this prospect and know my history of shrinking away. I have banged my head against the figurative wall so many times an outsider may use the cliché that I am scared of being happy. 

I am not in charge of my emotions and happiness is another thing I rely on from others.  At this moment, I am very doubtful that I will ever feel unconditional happiness again.  I wonder if this is something unachievable that we all chase or is there some secret to it I am yet to find. I guess I will continue wandering in the darkness alone on this one for now.

Until the moment that I can again be vulnerable, that I can again trust and be open, until the moment that I can accept myself, I don't think I will be able to accomplish this unconditional happiness I seek.  The steps for this just seem so far away for me.